At 1.25 metres high and roughly 45 by 75 centimetres across, it is not a dramatic monolith, but its placement on the crest of a ridge gives it a quiet presence that is hard to ignore once you know to look for it.

What makes this stone slightly puzzling is its absence from the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1842 and 1905, the standard cartographic record for rural monuments of this kind. It appears for the first time on the 1937 edition, which raises the question of whether it was simply overlooked by earlier surveyors, or whether the record itself was incomplete. The 1937 map places it just to the west of the site of Shanbally fort, a ringfort, the circular earthwork enclosure most commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, and to the east of a levelled earthwork, now largely gone. That cluster of features suggests a landscape that was once more densely marked by human activity than the present tillage fields might suggest.